Daily Search Forum Recap: April 30, 2008

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

What are Some Questions to Ask an SEO Firm to Check their Legitimacy?
If you were interviewing an SEO firm to see if they're for real, what questions would you ask them? A High Rankings Forum thread touches upon some of the must-know questions, and they're outlined below: How long they have been doing SEO? Can you give me three clients that you have had first-page results for? What are some campaigns you have succeeded with? Can you illustrate any significant traffic boosts or conversion boosts? What is

Search Conference Controversy Sparks Up Again
Kevin Ryan of Search Engine Strategies spoke with Daron Babin and discussed the current state of the conference circuit with regards to individuals believing that they have been banned from either SMX or SES events. Danny Sullivan kindly transcribed the event on Sphinn (which I'm very grateful for!) Here are some key points: According to a series of events, Rand Fishkin believes that he was banned from SES events. To respond to that allegation, Kevin

Which Advertiser Types Do You Put in Your Google AdSense Filter?
A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on what type of advertiser would you automatically add to your AdSense competitive filter list. I.e. which type ads do you not want showing up on your site? Here are some of the responses: Adult Related SitesRingtone SitesWin Free Stuff SitesIrrelevant SitesMFAsDeceptive SitesParked DomainsWork From HomeEtc. I would create a poll here, but the answers can be so open ended. Which type of ads would you block immediately? Forum discussion

Managing Duplicate Content In a World Where Google Can Crawl JavaScript
Now that Google admitted to crawling JavaScript and forms SEOs and Webmasters need to be aware of how to manage even more duplicate content issues. In the past, a good strategy was to build out filter pages (filter by color, size, price, etc.) using JavaScript pull down menus. Google would typically stay away from such forms and you would not necessarily have to worry about Google seeing the same content filtered or sorted by color,

Google Promotes iGoogle Artist Themes
Google is making a major promotional push for iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), with the new artist themes section. If you go to the Google home page, you will notice a special logo that looks like the logo on the right of this post, and a line that reads: What happens when great art mixes with your homepage? iGoogle Artist Themes Clicking on the logo or the link will take you to that special iGoogle